MREN Advanced Applications and Access to Remote Instrumentation

For many years, MREN has provided advanced communication services and networking in support of the primary educational and research missions of its constituent communities, and it continues to be at the forefront of providing high performance networking services for multiple advanced applications, including those requiring specialized capabilities, access to remote scientific instrumentation, and use of experimental research testbeds.

MREN and Advanced Applications

From its first implentation, MREN has supported many projects related to large-scale, high performance e-Science applications, which have always been one of the primary drivers of next generation technologies. These data, bandwidth and computationally intensive applications include those that utilize supercomputers, computational Grids, related distributed computaional facilities, and high performance clouds - including high energy physics, astrophysics, bioinformatics, computational biology, computational chemistry, data mining, high resolution visualization, digital engineering, geosciences, oceanographic and atmospheric studies, advanced digital media, medical imaging, financial data management, and e-commerce. Underlying such discipline-specific applications are other, cross-cutting applications, such as high resolution visualization, digital media, remote access to scientific instruments, specialized virtual-reality such as Teleimmersion (immersive virtual reality based on CAVE technologies),, and high-performance distributed systems. (ref: advanced medical imaging, astronomy and astrophysics)

Access to Remote Instrumentation

MREN also provides access to remote instrumentation such as special facilities used for high energy physics, for example, the key facilities at Fermilab (eg, collider detectors - D0 and CDF, high energy physics computational processors, and astronomy facilities, such as those related to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey project). MREN also provides access to the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at ANL, a 7 Gev synchrotron, as well as to the massively parallel (128 node) high performance computer at ANL's High Performance Computing Research Center. MREN is also working on projects to link advanced virtual reality environments among member institutions over high performance networks. These VR laboratories, a type of "holodeck," are based on CAVE technology developed by the EVL laboratory at UIC. Other projects involve linking terabyte mass storage facilities to high performance networks. The CATS project (Chicago-Argonne Terabyte System) is configured for 35 Terabyte and is scaleable to 180 TB. One early project used a satellite to establish digital communications to the UoC's NSF Center for Astrophysics Research in Antarctica (CARA) to create the first interactive digital video conference to the South Pole.

Global Advanced Applications

MREN continues to be involved in many types of international projects, for example, exploring options for enhanced connectivity to the large scale instrumentation on other continents, such as the European Center for Nuclear Physics (CERN) in Switzerland. MREN has been involved in a number of international advanced application initiatives through its cooperative efforts with the Science, Technology and Research Transit Access Point -- STAR TAP. Currently, it is involved with multiple projects based on StarLight, the “optical STAR TAP.”

iGRID Conferences

The types of applications that inform MREN's technical designs can be seen at the international iGRID conferences. The primary showcase of the world's most advanced network based applications are the iGRID conferences, events that demonstrate the power and potential of the "international Grid." Many excellent next generation applications have been demonstrated every two years as part of these iGrid international applications and technology showcases. These iGRID demonstrations are organized by the Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago along with other organizational partners. The goal of iGRID is to showcase the evolution and importance of global research community networking, especially by demonstrating applications being prototyped on the Global Grid. iGrid highlights achievements in Grid architecture development and the advancements enabled in science, engineering, cultural heritage, distance education, media communications, and art and architecture.

MREN also supports application demonstrations at the annual international supercomputer conferences, SC, including the recent SC10

In additional, MREN supports application demonstrations at the annual Global Lambda Grid Workshops, which use the world wide Global Lambda Integrated Facility  (GLIF www.glif.is).

© 2010 MREN

12-1-10